Apple on Thursday formally notified the court that they will appeal the guilty verdict and resulting injunctions handed down in July's e-book antitrust ruling.

Apple's fight against the Department of Justice will shift into the hands of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals as Cupertino's lead attorney, Orin Snyder, filed an official notice of appeal Thursday on behalf of the iPhone maker. Snyder previously indicated the company's plans to appeal in an August letter to Judge Denise Cote.

The notice comes nearly three months after Apple was found guilty of conspiring with major publishers to raise e-book prices and just one day before an injunction handed down as a result of the verdict was set to go into effect. The injunction would force Apple to stagger contract renegotiations with publishers and bring on an external compliance monitor, among other punishments.

"Notice is hereby given that Defendant Apple Inc. (?Apple?) appeals to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit from the Plaintiff United States? Final Judgment," Snyder wrote, "including the injunction the Court entered against Apple."

Apple is not required to submit its formal arguments for the appeal until early 2014, according toGigaOm.

On Friday, publisher Simon & Schuster filed a separate notice of appeal, though the CBS subsidiary only intends to fight the injunction due to its effect on the company's ability to renegotiate its contracts with Apple. Simon & Schuster settled with the Department of Justice in 2012.

It's not that simple, unfortunately. There is the very substantial ideological issue that has a meaningful impact on how Apple conducts negotiations. The settlement issues are more minor and don't have a real impact on Apple, but the precedent this sets is simply not acceptable to them.

"Since 1981 French law has fixed book-prices so that readers pay the same whether they buy online, from a big high street chain, or from a small bookseller. Extensive discounting is banned.

The law, which applies to all online booksellers, does allow for a small amount of discounting – as long as it is no more than 5%. Small booksellers argue they cannot compete with Amazon because it provides free postage and free fast delivery deals on top of 5% discount."

So if Apple can't compete with Amazon because their prices are too low to make a viable business out of it and takes steps to keep the business healthy, they are punished. In France, it's the law to fix the prices.

The problem is, they're both right. If retailers collude with suppliers to keep prices high then it costs consumers more and free market competition can't do anything about it. If big retailers use their infrastructure to price things so cheaply that smaller businesses can't compete with them, they'll drive them out of business very easily and people will lose jobs.

Implementing laws one way or the other and punishing selectively isn't the right thing to do but they can't keep the prices low enough to avoid harming consumers and high enough to encourage competition at the same time.

Thank you, Marvin, but with this formulation the US reader will provably be confirmed in his view that France is a communist country !

The price is not fixed by law (or the government) ! It is fixed by the publisher, but is unique, this is what the law says.

The 1981 law has been recently reinforced in the sense that Amazon can no longer offer for free the delivery of "physical" books, which was Amazon tactic to circumvent the law.

The US reader also has to know that one of the reasons why Amazon could do this is that it supported in France a lower tax scheme than the other "normal" (what you call "brick and mortar", I believe) distributors ... (it still does, by the way, because changing this would require a decision at European level)

Edited by Hydrogen - 10/4/13 at 12:48pm

There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life.

Giving Amazon a monopoly on book pricing where they sell the books below cost just to sell their Kindles is not a fair judgement. The authors are getting screwed and so is Amazon's competition. The Justice Department seems to feel an Amazon ebook store monopoly is the only solution. I applaud Apple to not just "let it go already"

“What would I do? I’d shut Apple down and give the money back to the shareholders”

How about no, we don’t let the truth be covered up and innocents be punished, okay?

For once I agree with you, the truth should come out and the innocent book buyers that had book prices jump up overnight due to Apple's shenanigans shouldn't be punished and should get their money back!

HOW about YES and let this massive corporation stop pretending its greedy for its shareholders and just move forward - i would respect a company that said "we don't agree but in the interest of progress we will move forward"...

Unless you are appealing the damage - but they are appealing both the verdict too - LET THE VERDICT STAND AND MOVE ON!

HOW about YES and let this massive corporation stop pretending its greedy for its shareholders and just move forward - i would respect a company that said "we don't agree but in the interest of progress we will move forward"...

Unless you are appealing the damage - but they are appealing both the verdict too - LET THE VERDICT STAND AND MOVE ON!

How about no, we get the truth to come out in court and no, we stop the FUD on forums.

I can do this all year. Stop lying.

Apple being a “massive corporation” is meaningless. Apple doesn’t really care about its shareholders any more than it has to. They care, however, about Amazon getting away with what Apple was WRONGFULLY accused of doing.

Giving Amazon a monopoly on book pricing where they sell the books below cost just to sell their Kindles is not a fair judgement. The authors are getting screwed and so is Amazon's competition. The Justice Department seems to feel an Amazon ebook store monopoly is the only solution. I applaud Apple to not just "let it go already"

BTW, where has KD gone? I was over at Groklaw to see what they said about the Samsung/Nokia/Apple case regarding Samsung showing its execs "attorney eyes only" documents only to find nothing is new over there. I guess PJ really is going to abandon Groklaw over the fake excuse of NSA spying on e-mails.

While I was there I remembered our resident "expert on everything" and realized he hasn't posted in some while. Perhaps some of these newbie accounts should take the hint as well.

Especially when the judge so clearly prejudged the case - and made some bizarre rulings.

Yeah, nothing like making a statement that "Apple is likely guilty" before the trial even starts.

And if that wasn't enough, making demands of Apple that go far beyond the scope of the case (like trying to force Apple to allow Apps to link to outside stores without paying Apple their 30% cut). Even funnier is the settlement the DOJ ended up proposing was far softer than what the judge proposed. IMO she has more than a little bias.

EDITED: Mixed them up. It was the DOJ who asked for strict terms and the judge who scaled them back.

Meanwhile you whine about Apple appealing and they should "let it go" when it's Apple's right to appeal. Unless you think the US should change laws to prevent anyone from ever appealing a decision and that whatever a court/judge decides should be final and written in stone.

He was recently fired by Samsung after his last bullshit campaign came in under quota.

Too bad. I was hoping to have a touchscreen debate with him after his claims to have been working in the industry for almost 20 years. I can't count how many times I tried to get him to prove his knowledge and experience in this industry to no avail. He probably never expected another AI member to also have 20+ years in touchscreen development (the first system I coded for was back in 1985).

Too bad. I was hoping to have a touchscreen debate with him after his claims to have been working in the industry for almost 20 years.

If I remember rightly, one of the last points he was attempting to convince everybody of was that Apple was unlikely to be able to fit a fingerprint sensor inside the home button that would do the job of the current button yet still remain responsive when detecting fingerprints.

c) assisting in ending the emerging practice of releasing e-books well after hard back releases

Tragically, the basis of Apple's legal guilt is simply that they were considered -- out of the gate -- a horizontal player -- in contraction to the entire history of anti-trust law in the United States (as I understand it).

"Lang Law is the informal name given to French law number 81-766, from 10 August 1981, relating to book prices. The law establishes a fixed price for books sold in France, limiting price discounts on them. The law is named after Jack Lang, the French Minister of Culture at the time.

The Lang Law works as follows:
The publisher decides on a price for its book and prints it on the back
Booksellers are not allowed to sell a book for a discount of more than 5% below the publisher's price."

"The Net Book Agreement (NBA) was a British fixed book price agreement between publishers and booksellers which set the prices at which books were to be sold to the public.

It came into effect on 1 January 1900 and involved retailers selling books at agreed prices. Any bookseller who sold a book at less than the agreed price would no longer be supplied by the publisher in question."

So if Apple changes the system so that publishers set the prices, they are punished for it. If the government does it, that's ok.

The main issue I suppose is the act of conspiring with multiple publishers to all do the same thing together but it's not like they agreed on prices together, they just agreed to change business models.